A thesis about real-time realistic rendering of nature scenes with dynamic lighting has been published. This thesis includes all details about real-time grass rendering and about real-time tree rendering with indirect lighting.

The new release of Equalizer is available. Equalizer is an open source project providing a minimally invasive programming interface and resource management system for parallel, scalable OpenGL applications. It allows an application to run unmodified on any visualization system, from a simple workstation to large scale graphics clusters and multi-GPU workstations.

The following video shows volume rendering using three GPUs and dynamic 2D load-balancing. The tiling is adapted each frame automatically and transparently to the application by Equalizer. The data set has 256^3 voxels, and is rendered using 2560 slices using the eVolve scalable volume renderer.

The graphics hardware behind the iPhone and iPod Touch is a PowerVR MBX Lite, which uses Tile-Based Deferred Rendering.

There are a few limitations you should know from the start:
* There is no stencil or accumulation buffer.
* There are only two texture units.
* The maximum texture size is 1024×1024 (use power of two only).
* The maximum space for textures and surfaces is 24MB.
* Only 2D textures are supported.
* There is no software rendering fallback.

The PowerVR chip uses a full floating-point pipeline throughout. The OpenGL lighting model is fully hardware accelerated, and there is no need to use fixed-point values for either lighting and material values, or vertex data. For best performance, use directional lights instead of point lights when possible, and try to always use indexed strips for geometry submission. To minimize bandwidth, you can use unsigned byte values for colors, and either unsigned byte or shorts instead of floats for texture coordinates.

What is really interesting to see is the emergence of what Microsoft terms as the Compute Shader, no doubt a marketing speak for GPGPU which they claim will allow the GPU, with it’s awesome power to be used for more than just graphics, which smells like CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture) to me.
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Issues like multi-threaded rendering/resource handling are things that were long time coming and yes, it’s a good thing we will finally see them in the newer version. It just makes my job as a game developer a whole lot easier. Most details on Shader Model 5.0 are pretty sketchy, so I won’t go into things like shader length and function recursion. However, I hope such issues are addressed satisfactorily in the newer shader model.
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Microsoft is still fixated on releasing version 11 only for Vista, so don’t expect your XP machines to ever run DirectX 11 even if you buy brand new hardware.

Big Nerd Ranch announces the October 2008 session of OpenGL Bootcamp. This intensive 5-day training course will arm you with the knowledge to make your 2D and 3D visualizations fly! As problem sets explode in complexity, radical gains in performance have resulted from moving traditional graphics processing from the CPU to graphics hardware. If you are doing any work concerning graphics, then you must know OpenGL and this class is the fastest way to master the ideas and techniques of OpenGL programming. By taking full advantage of hardware acceleration, shaders, blending, textures and video we’ll help you get the most out of your data. Learn how OpenGL works, what functionality it does and does not provide, various optimization methods for both static and dynamic data, and much more. The course will provide libraries and frameworks for abstracting the operating system and allowing the student to focus solely on learning OpenGL.

Similar to DirectX 10, DirectX 11 will be available only on Windows Vista and future versions of Microsoft’s operating system. DirectX 11 will add new compute shader technology that Microsoft says will allow GPUs to be used “for more than just 3D graphics,” allowing developers to utilize video cards as parallel processors.

DirectX 11 will support tessellation, a feature which can potentially assist developers in making models appear smoother when seen up close. Multi-threaded resource handling is also incorporated, making it easier for games to utilize multi-core processors in a user’s machine.

Arauna is a real-time ray tracer developed for game development. Being a real-time ray tracer, it is experimental, and does not yet deliver the performance needed to produce graphics of the same quality as modern games do using a GPU. However, in its class, it is one of the fastest (probably the fastest) renderer. Two games have been developed already using Arauna, both by students of the IGAD program of the NHTV University of Applied Sciences (Breda, The Netherlands).

Microsoft will start talking about DirectX 11 in less than two weeks. his conference takes place on the 22 and 23 July in Seattle, Washington.

The big feature of DirectX 11 is tessellation / displacement while we also heard that multithreaded rendering and compute shaders are part of it. DirectX 11 also brings shader model 5.0 but we don’t know many details about it.

It looks like DirectX 11 will stick to rasterization as there is no any mentioning of Ray tracing support.